Today I'm delighted to welcome author Wendy Walker to the blog for the Blog Tour of All Is Not Forgotten, the psychological thriller you cannot miss this year. It is probably one of the best and darkest psychological thrillers I have read in a long while. And now, Wendy is sharing her thoughts about writing about sexual violence with us, a very interesting guest post:

Writing About Sexual Violence by Wendy Walker

When I began to write the crime scenes for my thriller, All Is Not Forgotten, I knew I was walking a very fine line. On the one hand, I wanted the reader to understand the severity of the crime my young protagonist survived. On the other hand, I was writing about the one crime that causes extreme discomfort – rape. How do I do this? I struggled with the question. How do I describe the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl?

A thought came to mind. Maybe I could just say it was a violent rape and let readers fill in the blanks with whatever details they could tolerate. But then another thought came on its heels. Isn’t every rape violent? Why is it we can tolerate extreme depictions of other violent crimes like stabbings, shootings and torture, but not rape? Is it because rape involves the act of sex? Are we still unable to see the wall between sex and sexual violence?

I decided to do more research. I read the stories written by survivors. I read medical reports about injuries, and psychology papers on treatments for PTSD. I also read articles about injustice in rape prosecutions. And I learned as much as I could about what rape is, what it does to a body, what it does to a mind.

After wrestling with this dilemma, I decided to write about the rape as if my protagonist were stabbed or shot or bludgeoned. I chose to describe her injuries as I would with any violent act. The message from survivors came through loud and clear. All rape is violence. They write in great, descriptive detail of each moment. They use the words vagina and genitals and bruising and brutally thrusting and penetration. They describe the loss of their integrity, their virtue, their identities. And they tell us what they feel when it’s happening and when it’s over, and for years to come. These are the words they want the world to hear, whether they make us uncomfortable or not.

Maybe we need to get uncomfortable so we never lose sight of that wall between sex and sexual violence – so there is no doubt about what rape is and what rape does.

One in four women know the answer. What does it mean to be raped? I turned to the words written by those who know, and I chose those words so that the rest of us might better understand.

Blurb: In the small, affluent town of Fairview, Connecticut everything seems picture perfect.

Until one night when young Jenny Kramer is attacked at a local party. In the hours immediately after, she is given a controversial drug to medically erase her memory of the violent assault. But, in the weeks and months that follow, as she heals from her physical wounds, and with no factual recall of the attack, Jenny struggles with her raging emotional memory. Her father, Tom, becomes obsessed with his inability to find her attacker and seek justice while her mother, Charlotte, prefers to pretend this horrific event did not touch her perfect country club world.

As they seek help for their daughter, the fault lines within their marriage and their close-knit community emerge from the shadows where they have been hidden for years, and the relentless quest to find the monster who invaded their town - or perhaps lives among them - drive this psychological thriller to a shocking and unexpected conclusion.